“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“

Meanwhile Ariel with legs;

Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.

Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.

and i mean hell this has been talked about before in more depth than i can, but when people complain about how the ending was changed (the original fairytale does not give ariel a happy ending, she dies trying to protect the prince), i think about the fact that this was written by a gay man in the 1980s

and i think it’s entirely valid (and gives her an extremely strong connection to the queer community) to change the story so she doesn’t die because of who she loves

Triton made escape a necessity. Once someone goes to the point of destroying your possessions in a violent rampage, there is no staying and sticking it out, there’s no safety. (And Ariel, even in Ursula’s lair, gave Triton more thought than he deserved at the time.) Nowhere in the ocean she could go and be safe. Everyone’s always ‘why don’t they just leave :|’ in abusive situations until the leaving is not something they find 100% worthy of approval.

Ursula made it about Eric. She didn’t have to. Ariel had to get out from under Triton’s thumb, it could have been literally anything. Ursula took advantage of a desperate victim for her own agenda. Realistic predatory behavior toward a vulnerable person.

And also

1. There’s always the ‘Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek’ criticism - FIRST OF ALL he started out looking for a woman who wasn’t silent, and second of all what part of the carriage driving bit (or any of her other actions on land) is meek, exactly?
2. People above have noted the queer subtext. Now, on the subject of Ariel being willing to leave her family, aside from the baseline ‘this is an abusive environment and she was not safe there’ angle I already mentioned, consider: Ariel’s father made it clear he would stop at nothing to crush and tear down who she was and replace it with what he wanted her to be. Now - what demographic might that resonate with? And given Ashman’s involvement, do you think that was a coincidence?

there has been scholarly discussion about the idea that the og little mermaid story, where she dies at the end, was written as a queer allegory.

so taking that into account… there is something very touching about taking this story from hans christian andersen from beyond the grave and being like “things are different now. they get to be happy. she gets to live.”

also in re: “Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek” the meek part’s been discussed but can we please talk about how when he first met her he thought she wasn’t the girl with the voice that he was trying to find and was disappointed, but that he slowly fell for her anyway? He’d explicitly wanted Ariel WITH her voice, but came to love her without it.

The bit about Howard Ashman being queer is finally giving me some glimmer of understanding of why the teenaged girl mermaid is named “Ariel.” Because, although the Disney movie single-handedly changed popular perception thereafter, Ariel is a boy’s name. Howard Ashman absolutely knew that.

(Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest also has male pronouns, in case anyone was struggling to remember.)

Another thing I appreciate rewatching The Little Mermaid as an adult is although he does ultimately grant her wish and say goodbye to her at her wedding, King Triton destroying Ariel’s collection effectively ends their relationship. Like no. You dont go on a violent rampage on your daughter’s most beloved possessions and expect that relationship to ever be restored. He makes good to her by essentially letting her go and live the life he tried to deny her. And I kind of appreciate that.

I think one of my favourite moments in all of critical role was at the end of c2 when they all, starting with Ashley, Travis, and Laura, slowly counted and they realised that they finally, organically, had nine people. That here at the end of it all, they were the Mighty Nein.

It made me cry then and I guarantee it’ll make me cry at the end of the show too.

harry potter fandom experiencing such a revival in the last 5 or so years to the point where 5 out of the top 10 ships on ao3 this year are hp AFTER that woman started fully funding hate campaigns with her royalties is so bleak. fandom isn’t an indicator of morality but what are we doing here man.

I don't know if people are aware, but in the middle of last year, there was a whole mess of batch-uploading/account connecting from the former FictionAlley site and it wasn't necessarily done by the author.

I assumed the site was dead and all my fics were long lost. I'd also been going through every archive I could find where my Potter fics were still available and purging them all.

So imagine my surprise when I start getting notifications that multiple Potter fics have been added to my account and attributed to me. They were mine, but they weren't being added by me - my email for FA and my email for AO3 were the same, so there was some weird importing/association shenanigans happening which meant I suddenly had 20+ and rising Potter fics turning up on my account.

Thankfully, there was an option to let them to know to stop slapping my fics onto my account without my approval. I get there's some element of "we're archiving fics for the future", but that was a horrible, horrible thing to wake up to. I don't want to be associated by that woman any more than I have to be, even if that fandom was once incredibly important to me.

In the end I had to go back through my account and manually delete every. single. one. I think I was at upwards of 40 by the time they stopped.

I don't know if this has happened to other authors or if, to 'archive' said fics, they are importing them under the FA name. I just know it would be worth having a check on AO3 to make sure your fics aren't there under an old e-mail address.

I love how the Mighty Nein’s plan hinged on the assumption that Trent would freak the fuck out at the sight of Caleb.

Their whole plan relied solely on Trent being so terrified of Caleb that he immediately orders the beacon locked away in the vault. He’s so sure Caleb is going to successfully steal this thing in front of a hundred part goers. At just a few vaguely threatening sentences and one intimidating look from across the room.

And then it works.

We always see how Caleb is haunted by Trent but this episode was a reminder that it’s also the other way around. If Trent was so sure in his ability to beat/manipulate Caleb, he wouldn’t have his the Beacon away.

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Huge shout out to all the people who read fics. Who actually take the time out of their busy days to open a fic and read it

Before I started writing in earnest, I did not understand how much writing was going to eat into my fic reading time. We joke about having too many tabs open, but I have a different problem: the amount of tabs I have open on new fics is way smaller than it used to be. My ao3 wrapped would be a sad affair. Unless I’ve subscribed to an author or come across something on my dash, I basically don’t see it

Which has really driven home for me how much fandom cannot just be creators. You have to have people who want to read fic and meta discussions and joke posts. You have to have people who want to look at art and gifs. It has to be mutual.

Community thrives on flow. You have to have that movement of people sharing things with each other for a community to exist

Thank you fic readers. You keep things flowing

honestly you all are so annoying because motherhood IS interesting but fandom people are simultaneously obsessed with deciding that every woman has motherly qualities and completely disinterested in actually exploring motherhood as a role that informs a character. I do think exploring a character being a mother can be wildly interesting if they are canonically one, but because of misogyny, people just view motherhood as a totally unremarkable naturalized state that all women must inhabit!

I've reblogged this before as-is, but have been thinking about it more lately due to my attempts to conceive ... Actually, to me fandom on Tumblr seems singularly obsessed with declaring that no female characters that are remotely interesting would be mothers, to the point that I only tend to see anything about ships having kids very rarely and when I do, nearly always it's from m/m perspectives (sometimes in fantasy contexts, sometimes just "this is what I want so it happens"). It seems to have become law that women who are at all driven or tough or smart Wouldn't Do That, which on the one hand gets around the sexist idea that every woman MUST want to have kids while on the other being sexist in that motherhood can never be explored in fandom, as exploring it is inherently suspicious.

A thing I like about the way Essek's mother is killed in the animated show is that narratively Essek deserves it. Essek has been murdering people indirectly to get what he wants so making him confront the realness one of his kills directly with his own hands is delicious and it's of his own making. His mother turned herself in so Essek would stop hurting people (and losing himself) on her behalf. It's almost like justice.

However Essek getting what he deserves doesn't better the world. He has his best friend, a decent person, killed cruelly and dishonorably immediately after. He's getting the beacon back with single minded purpose with no regard for other lives. He's learned nothing from his mother's death, not even how to deal with his own grief which is the point of everything he's been doing the whole season.

The world is not better and Essek is not better when he is hurt and left hurting. Even if his pain, with the exception of his mother getting a terminal illness, is of his own making.

I like that narrative punishment happens and it does not better the future because this is where the messiness of redemption lies. He may not deserve it, but it betters the world if he is better, and in getting better he can grow to cherish the kindnesses of the world and it will feel more and more narratively that he deserves that kindness.

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Essek and Caleb at Jester and Fjord's wedding party, k-i-s-s-i-n-g

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